Have Elites Decided to Legalize Some US Drugs?

The war on drugs has succeeded only in putting millions of Americans in jail … Televangelist Pat Robertson recently made a gaffe. A gaffe, as journalist Michael Kinsley defined it, occurs when a political figure accidentally tells the truth. Robertson’s truth is that America’s drug war has failed and that the country should legalize marijuana. This view goes against the deepest political, moral and religious positions Robertson has held for decades, so imagine the blinding evidence that he has had to confront—and that has been mounting for years—on this topic. Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life. “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than 6 million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” – Fareed Zakaria /Time

Dominant Social Theme: We need to legalize it now because we made a mistake in not legalizing it before.

Free-Market Analysis: What’s going on here? The US has jailed tens of millions in the past decade over drug infractions. But now we seem to be seeing some re-thinking.

We usually speculate such campaigns are part of larger elite dominant social themes intended to manipulate public opinion. We think we detect such a pattern here.

First Pat Robertson writes about legalizing marijuana and then CNN’s Fareed Zakaria writes about it as well. And that’s not all.

A random search of Google shows that a bill to legalize medical marijuana is moving forward in the Tennessee House and that the Rhode Island Senate is discussing legalization as well. In Yakima, Washington, a former Seattle police chief and a former state senator will hold a public forum on the legalization of marijuana. Here’s some more from the article:

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many … As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population but we make up 25% of the [world’s] jailed prisoners.”